Hashtag crowned 2012 word of the year

Heidi Stevens, Tribune Newspapers

And you thought that Notre Dame/Alabama match-up was heated.

Wait until you hear how things went down in Boston last weekend when members of the American Dialect Society—linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, writers, editors, scholars—engaged in an all-out skirmish over the 2012 word of the year.

Team "fiscal cliff" and team "YOLO" made strong showings. "Marriage equality" came from behind and threatened to knock them both from the running. There was mention made of crowning "Gangnam style" the victor.

But "hashtag," in the end, proved impossible to defeat.

"It had an obvious appeal to a room full of linguists and lexicographers and language watchers, in that it is itself a kind of meta-linguistic term for this new kind of communication," Ben Zimmer, chair of the new words committee of the American Dialect Society (and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and vocabulary.com) explained to us after the vote. "It's a phrase that is specifically related to Twitter, but people are finding it a useful vehicle and a new way of crafting online talk."

And here is where the football analogies start to fall a bit flat. Zimmer made no mention of anyone's A game. He offered exactly zero examples of grammarians giving 110 percent. And at no point did he discuss the hotness of AJ McCarron's girlfriend, Katherine Webb.

He did defend the victory of "hashtag," defined by the ADS as "a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#), used on Twitter to mark a topic or make a commentary."

"We've been getting the kind of jaded response, 'Oh, that's not a new word,'" Zimmer says. "We made it clear from the beginning the word doesn't have to be new, as long as it's newly prominent. And 2012 was the year 'hashtag' broke in a big way, not just because people are much more comfortable and familiar with Twitter and Twitter discourse, but because it's also showing up in other social media and actual oral use."

The 124-year-old American Dialect Society's word of the year is a 23-year-old tradition, by which the members put their heads together to determine which word best captures the zeitgeist of the previous year.

"The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead," the American Dialect Society says on its site (americandialect.org). "It is fully informed by the members' expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion."

"We don't take ourselves too seriously," says Zimmer.

This is thanks, no doubt, in part to the fact that they spent several hours bandying about YOLO, before the acronym for "You Only Live Once" was ultimately done in by its rapid rise and just-as-rapid descent.

"We saw the whole life cycle of YOLO in the course of 2012," says Zimmer. "It burst out fresh and was being used in all these different ways and by the end of year it was time to say goodbye."

"Marriage equality," defined by ADS as "legal recognition of same-sex marriage," tapped a different cultural vein.

"It captures the way that the fight for same-sex marriage was kind of reframed under the rubric of marriage equality," says Zimmer. "The way that argument is found now is the way we're coming to think of this whole movement for legal recognition as a fight for marriage equality."

The group also votes on other word categories, including most creative and most outrageous. Some of the winners:

Most useful: "-(po)calypse, -(ma)geddon:" Hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes.

Most creative: "gate lice:" Airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board.